Apple Lossless Confusion

There’s a lot of confusion about audio encoding, and how to get the best out of your digital music. Obviously we at B&W are keen to promote the benefits of lossless encoding, especially with our Music Club and Zeppelin iPod speaker system.

However, confusion abounds about how to get lossless versions of your music onto your iPod, as is clear from this thread on the What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision forums.

Unfortunately for people who have already ripped their record collection at a lower bit rate – even say 320kbps – you’ll need to re-rip your CD collection if you are looking to upgrade the sound. Just reformatting your music in Apple Lossless won’t make any difference.

The good news is that the effort will be well worth it: it will sound a lot better and with the cost of hard drive space dropping by the day it will only cost you time to do it!

For a quick guide how to set up iTunes for lossless encoding click here.

Is Blu-Ray the saviour of high-quality stereo?

It’s been known for a while that Neil Young’s long-awaited Archives is going to be released on Blu-ray. But now that Amazon in the US is taking pre-release orders it got us thinking about Blu-ray as an audio format. There’s very little music currently available on the new format, and much of that is surround sound mixes of Jazz and live events.

But Neil is apparently in its for the sound quality, as he told reporters at the launch earlier this year. "I thought DVD would be good enough, but you couldn't navigate around materials whilst listening to the music, and I thought that that's what my fans would want to do. Also we were defeated by technology with the sound. Now with Java you can listen in the best possible quality that we have today.

Hi Fi Writer has an interesting take on the Blu-ray question, asking when all those lovely high-resolution DVD-Audio and SACD discs will come out on Blu-ray, where developments such as Dolby True HD are working wonders for surround sound. We want the same for stereo, don’t you?

Computer Games: The Future of Surround Sound?

Computer games were once just for kids; many of those kids are in their 30s and 40s now, and many of them are still playing games. But as we get older, we get more demanding, and not just for the complexity and realism in the game play, but the way a game looks and feels, and, especially relevant here, how it sounds.
Recently Guitar Hero and Metallica hit the headlines, because the game offered a less compressed version of the Death Magnetic album than the CD release. But with amazing sound track licensing in the likes of Grand Theft Auto, which has an Iggy Pop hosted ‘radio station’ and DTS and Dolby in-game surround sound processing, games are getting closer to film with each passing year – and are more in need of decent surround sound system than ever!
What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision has just put together its five most cinematic games, and it got us thinking. What if the games console became the source component of choice for Home Theatre in the future? The Sony PS3 is the world’s most popular Blu-ray player, but would you consider using a console as your main source, even if you didn’t play games?

How Many Speakers?

After listening to the podcast discussion about surround sound in the Lab it got us wondering just how many speakers is enough for Home Theatre. The standard is obviously 5.1, with five speakers and a dedicated subwoofer. But we recently supplied speakers and amplification for a What Hi-Fi? demonstration at the Stuff Live Show for a 7.2 system, and looking at the specifications on most surround sound receivers we wondered whether you used 5.1, 6.1, 7.2 or any other multiples of speakers. Let us know.